The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
A pattern recognition system, such as a speech recognition system or a handwriting recognition system, takes an input signal and attempts to decode the signal to find a pattern represented by the signal. For example, in a speech recognition system, a speech signal (often referred to as a test signal) is received by the recognition system and is decoded to identify a string of words represented by the speech signal.
Many pattern recognition systems utilize models in which units are represented by a single tier of connected states. Using a training signal, probability distributions for occupying the states and for transitioning between states are determined for each of the units. In speech recognition, phonetic units are used. To decode a speech signal, the signal is divided into frames and each frame is transformed into a feature vector. The feature vectors are then compared to the distributions for the states to identify a most likely sequence of states that can be represented by the frames. The phonetic unit that corresponds to that sequence is then selected.